1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 124. The Band – Music From Big Pink (1968)

 

Bob Dylan’s backing band, formerly known as The Hawks, are here unleashed and allowed to do their own thing. Although several tracks are written by Dylan, and he provided the cover art (either charmingly naive or amateur rubbish depending on your point of view), Dylan decided in the end not to join the rest of The Band in the music recording, so that his presence didn’t become the focus and they were allowed to be their own act. Which was nice of him.

Big Pink itself is the nickname for the house in New York county that Levon Helm, Rick Danko, and Garth Hudson shared for a while, and where many tracks were composed. The music is very Americana, feeling often like adaptations of spirituals or gospel tracks. This is probably helped along by, say, the various Biblical references in a track like The Weight, where the singer “pulled into Nazareth” and met characters such as “Carmen and the Devil” and “Old Luke, waiting on the Judgment Day”. I thought this might have been a Dylan track – the parade of odd characters has his fingerprints all over it – but it’s credited to guitarist Robbie Robertson. Dylan provided This Wheels on Fire, and the prisoner’s lament I Shall Be Released. Talking of prisons, there’s another version of The Long Black Veil, which was also sung by Johnny Cash at Folsom; it’s a story told by a dead man who was hanged for, we aren’t told explicitly, but the implication is that he has murdered the husband of his lover when caught in flagrante. The widow visits the grave of the dead narrator, and only he knows and, being dead, cannot tell (except to us, the audience).

Most of the tracks feature Richard Daniel’s slightly Kermit-esque vocals, and it’s good to have Garth Hudson’s organ wandering through many of the tracks; together these provide the defining sound of The Band.